“I know Ise a mean black nigger,” he often said, “and I’ll let you all know it on this heah white man’s car, too.”
The chef was a great black bundle of consciously suppressed desires. That was doubtless why he was so ornery. He was one of the model chefs of the service. His kitchen was well-ordered. The checking up of his provisions always showed a praiseworthy balance. He always had his food ready on time, feeding the heaviest rush of customers as rapidly as the lightest. He fed the steward excellently. He fed the crew well. In a word, he did his duty as only a martinet can.
A chef who is “right-there” at every call is the first asset of importance on an à la carte restaurant-car. The chef lived rigidly up to that fact and above it. He was also painfully honest. He had a mulatto wife and a brown boy-child in New York and he never slipped away any of the company’s goods to them. Other dining-car men had devised a system of getting by the company’s detectives with choice brands of the company’s foodstuffs. The chef kept away from that. It was long since the yard detectives had stopped searching any parcel that he carried off with him.
“I don’t want none o’ the white-boss stuff foh mine,” he declared. “Ise making enough o’ mah own to suppoht mah wife and kid.”
And more, the chef had a violent distaste for all the stock things that “coons” are supposed to like to the point of stealing them. He would not eat watermelon, because white people called it “the niggers’ ice-cream.” Pork chops he fancied not. Nor corn pone. And the idea of eating chicken gave him a spasm. Of the odds and ends of chicken gizzard, feet, head, rump, heart, wing points, and liver—the chef would make the most delicious stew for the crew, which he never touched himself. The Irish steward never missed his share of it. But for his meal the chef would grill a steak or mutton chop or fry a fish. Oh, chef was big and haughty about not being “no regular darky”! And although he came from the Alabama country, he pretended not to know a coon tail from a rabbit foot.
“All this heah talk about chicken-loving niggers,” he growled chuckingly to the second cook, “The way them white passengers clean up on mah fried chicken I wouldn’t trust one o’ them anywheres near mah hen-coop.”
Broiling tender corn-fed chicken without biting a leg. Thus, grimly, the chef existed. Humored and tolerated by the steward and hated by the waiters and undercooks. Jake found himself on the side of the waiters. He did not hate the chef (Jake could not hate anybody). But he could not be obscenely sycophantic to him as the second cook, who was just waiting for the chance to get the chef’s job. Jake stood his corner in the coffin, doing his bit in diplomatic silence. Let the chef bawl the waiters out. He would not, like the second cook, join him in that game.
Ray, perhaps, was the chief cause of Jake’s silent indignation. Jake had said to him: “I don’t know how all you fellows can stand that theah Goddamn black bull. I feels like falling down mahself.” But Ray had begged Jake to stay on, telling him that he was the only decent man in the kitchen. Jake stayed because he liked Ray. A big friendship had sprung up between them and Jake hated to hear the chef abusing his friend along with the other waiters. The other cooks and waiters called Ray “Professor.” Jake had never called him that. Nor did he call him “buddy,” as he did Zeddy and his longshoremen friends. He called him “chappie” in a genial, semi-paternal way.
Jake’s life had never before touched any of the educated of the ten dark millions. He had, however, a vague idea of who they were. He knew that the “big niggers” that were gossiped about in the saloons and the types he had met at Madame Adelina Suarez’s were not the educated ones. The educated “dick-tees,” in Jake’s circles were often subjects for raw and funny sallies. He had once heard Miss Curdy putting them in their place while Susy’s star eyes gleamed warm approval.
“Honey, I lived in Washington and I knowed inside and naked out the stuck-up bushwhackers of the race. They all talks and act as if loving was a sin, but I tell you straight, I wouldn’t trust any of them after dark with a preacher. … Don’t ask me, honey. I seen and I knows them all.”
“I guess you does, sistah,” Susy had agreed. “Nobody kaint hand me no fairy tales about niggers. Wese all much of a muchness when you git down to the real stuff.”
Difficulties on the dining-car were worsened by a feud between the pantry and the kitchen. The first waiter, who was pantryman by regulation, had a grievance against the chef and was just waiting to “get” him. But, the chef being such a paragon, the “getting” was not easy.
Nothing can be worse on a dining-car than trouble between the pantry and the kitchen, for one is as necessary to the other as oil is to salad. But the war was covertly on and the chef was prepared to throw his whole rhinoceros weight against the pantry. The first waiter had to fight cautiously. He was quite aware that a first-class chef was of greater value than a first-class pantryman.
The trouble had begun through the “mule.” The fourth man—a coffee-skinned Georgia village boy, timid like a country girl just come to town—hated the nickname, but the chef would call him nothing else.
“Call him ‘Rhinoceros’ when he calls you ‘Mule,’ ” Ray told the fourth
